


let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together

by butforthegrace



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, New York City, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 23:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They don’t consult their mother before they leave, or anybody else; they just wake up early one morning, grab bags that have already been packed, and get into the creaky red car their mother bought Rose last year.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this ages ago and figured I ought to finally post it.

The summer they’re seventeen, Rose and Dave take off on a road trip.

More accurately: they run away from home.

They don’t consult their mother before they leave, or anybody else; they just wake up early one morning, grab bags that have already been packed, and get into the creaky red car their mother bought Rose last year.  The sun’s barely risen and the day is cool and the grass is brown, and Dave falls asleep sprawled out across the backseat as Rose drives.  The radio is on, playing soft jazz; after a while Rose reaches out and turns it off and drives with near-silence in her ears.

The evergreens rise up on the side of the road as she drives downstate.  There is almost no one else on the road, and even when they get to the highway it’s still empty, just miles of concrete stretching out before them.

It’s three hours before Dave wakes up, bleary-eyed; he nearly slides off the vinyl backseat.  Rose doesn’t take her eyes from the road, but she hears the rub of denim on vinyl, hears Dave groan and then the little creaks of a boy sitting up.

She doesn’t ask how he slept.  Instead: “Toss me a cigarette.”

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“So? There’s one in my raincoat, and my lighter.”

“Why did you even bring a raincoat?” Dave asks, even as he reaches into one of its pockets, hand disappearing into the shiny black plastic; his fingers close around the lighter and the pack of cigarettes, and he sighs before he pulls them out.

Instead of handing them to Rose, he maneuvers himself into the shotgun seat.  She doesn’t look at him, even as he brushes a lock of her hair behind her ear.

“Just give me the cigarette, Dave.”

He looks at the pack of cigarettes, and at the lighter, which looks like a toy pistol, pearl-handed; draws a cigarette out of the pack and hands it to Rose.

She inclines her head towards him, very slightly.  “Light.”

He sighs again, and does as she asks.

Bitter smoke fills the little car, but Dave’s learned by now how to deal with it; he rolls down a window and watches the smoke drift out, watches the trees as they blur past.

“Do you miss school?” he asks once the cigarette is half gone, and the trees are thinning out a little; he can see a sign up ahead for some nearby rest stop, and he wonders whether they should stop.

The answer is prompt: “No.”  But her hands tighten on the steering wheel, knuckles turning white, sticking out of her skin like fence posts.

He doesn’t press her.  Instead he turns on the radio, searches until he finds what he thinks is a folk station, and leans against his seat to watch Rose’s quiet pale face.  Normally he wouldn’t bother with folk—it’s neither cool nor ironic—but for a beat-up red car on a dark road surrounded by old trees and pale blue sky, it seems right.

They sit like this for another two hours, not stopping, just silent and still even as the car propels them down the highway.  Dave watches Rose.  Rose watches the road.  Neither of them speaks.  Their cell phones do not ring.

“Do you think Mom’s even awake?” he asks her after the tenth time he checks to make sure his phone isn’t on silent.

“She’s probably too hungover to notice we’re gone.”  There’s no bitterness; he would marvel at how matter-of-fact she is about it, but it’s been too many years for him to be surprised anymore.

So Dave says nothing.  There’s nothing to say.

 

 

They stop at an eponymous diner in Roscoe.  Dave figures they’re about two and a half hours from New York City, though he hasn’t asked yet if they’re going to actually go to the city, or if Rose has something else in mind.  They never figured out locations or motels or anything when they decided to go on a road trip; Rose kept everything close to her chest, and whenever Dave had asked, she’d just said, “You’ll see.”

Rose orders a hamburger—rare—and Dave gets a salad; they both watch their waitress walk away.

“So,” he says, as she brings the straw in her water glass to her mouth, “we _do_ have money for this, right?”

She rolls her eyes.  “Don’t be irrational, Dave.  Of course we do.”

“How is that irrational?”

“We’ve spent the last two weeks preparing for this trip.  Don’t you think we’d have enough money for a _diner?_ ” She sucks on the straw, and Dave’s too busy watching her mouth to think of anything resembling a clever, cool retort.

“Anyway,” she continues, looking up at him—he looks away as quickly as possible but he can still see a smirk on her face—“I swiped Mom’s credit card before we left.”

“ _Rose._ ”

“What?” she says innocently, and he looks back at her, at her slight smile, and he can’t find words in his throat.  Her purple nails are digging into her cheek, and she’s tilting her head, and there’s hair that needs to be pushed back behind her ears.

There’s lipstick on her straw, dark violet.  He notices that, too.

Their food arrives soon after, and they’re done talking, but Dave’s not done looking; he keeps glancing up at Rose as she devours her hamburger.  There’s juice dripping past her lips, down her chin, and he wants nothing more than to lean across the table and kiss it off—

“What are you staring at?” Rose asks, though she full well knows, and Dave bows his head and goes back to his salad.

 

 

Forty minutes later they’re standing outside and Rose is smoking and Dave is leaning against the car, ignoring the metal burning into his back; he’s watching her lips around the cigarette and watching the smoke blow away and watching that little smirk, that smirk that says she knows she has him.

 

 

They pull in at a motel late that afternoon, a Super 8 somewhere in Queens.  Turns out Rose wanted to go to the city after all: Dave saw her hands clench on the wheel when they entered city limits, and the slight upward tilt of her mouth.

Apparently she made a reservation, she’s had this all planned, because when they go in she smiles charmingly at the bored clerk (who, Dave notes, perks up when Rose walks in) and informs him that they’ve got a reservation.  Of course, it’s possible that no reservation was actually made.  This _is_ Rose; she can sweet-talk anyone into anything.  He knows because she’s done it to him several times.

“Well,” Rose says, opening the door to their shabby room.  “I certainly feel like I’m in a Hilton.”

Dave rolls his eyes and drags his bag inside.  “You picked this place.”

“Mm.”  She sounds remarkably like their mother when she makes that noise, and Dave stiffens slightly as the door slams shut.

Rose runs a hand lightly along a desk that’s probably not even real wood; it’s painted black, but some of the paint is peeling.  “Someone spent a lot on this.”

“Jesus, Rose, shut up, you sound like Mom,” he groans, flopping onto the room’s single bed.  “I wouldn’t have driven with you all the way to _New York City_ to escape Mom if I knew I wasn’t escaping her after all.”

She looks at him with an expression he can’t read.  Which is par for the course with her, but it doesn’t mean he likes it any better.

 

 

They’re standing in the middle of Times Square an hour later, and Dave is complaining about the crowds.  “God, I hate the city,” he grumbles, and Rose shakes her head.

She’s wearing lipstick again, so he can’t help but look at her mouth when she speaks, and even when she doesn’t.  “It’s not the _city._   The city’s fine.  You just don’t like the tourists.  Which, might I remind you, is a group that we belong to.”

He snorts as she takes out a cigarette, silences himself when she turns to him and holds out her lighter expectantly.

His hand trembles as it nears her mouth, and he hopes she didn’t notice.

By the arch of her eyebrows, vague shadows behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses, he can tell that she did.

 

 

Rose doesn’t take off the sunglasses for the rest of the day, until it gets dark as they’re eating in a Midtown diner around eight.  They’re purple, heart-shaped; their father gave them to her on her last birthday and though Rose would never admit it, Dave knows that she quite likes them.

They’re perched on her head now, bright spots in her light hair; he keeps wondering if they’re going to fall every time she brings her fork to her mouth.  (She’s eating pancakes, the stack a mile high; Dave’s got a turkey sandwich in front of him despite having been urged repeatedly to get something more “filling”.  At least he got fries with it.)  But they stay still, woven into her hair.

The longer they sit in their corner booth, the more people come in; Dave gets coffee and watches the various newcomers from behind his own sunglasses.  Tired parents and their wide-eyed children; two teenagers giggling; two women on a date.  He thinks for a moment that he’s seen someone from school—but it’s not her, just someone who looks like her.

He rubs his eyes, and Rose looks up.  Strange—she can ignore him when he talks or screams at her, but if he does something like scratch his wrist, she pays rapt attention.

“Tired?”

“A little.”

She glances at her plate, full of tiny scraps of fluffy pancake.  “Well, flag down the waitress the next time she comes by, and we’ll pay and go back home.”

“You mean the motel.”

She doesn’t say anything.

 

 

The city streets are beautiful at night: bright and lit and full.  People wander down them, intertwined; even the honking of cars sounds almost like music to Dave.  Not that he’d ever say it to anyone, especially not Rose.

But when he reaches out, just a little, and brushes his fingers against hers, she takes his hand.

 

 

She’s wearing shorts, and knee-high stockings, and sitting on the edge of the bed next to him.  He notices suddenly that one of the stockings appears to be in fact ankle-high, and he drops off the bed and kneels on the floor before her.

“What are you doing?” she asks, amused, as he begins to push the stocking back up, fingers massaging the soft skin of her calf.

He doesn’t answer, just looks up at her, and then he presses a kiss to the inside of her thigh.  She gasps a little, and it’s a sign to keep going, keep kissing her leg until he reaches the hem of her shorts, and she grabs his hair with both fists and he can’t tell whether she wants to pull him towards her or push him away, but then she tugs him up so that she can kiss him, properly, on the mouth.

Her stocking falls down again.  Neither of them notices.

 

 

They spend five more days in New York before they decide to leave.

More accurately: Rose decides to leave.

She wakes up one morning and informs Dave, as he steps out of the shower, that they’ve got to check out by eleven today if they don’t want to be charged extra, and he takes that as a sign that they’re going back home.

“We’re not,” she says when he asks.  “We’re going back to school.  We’ll swing by home first, to get our things—Mom’s in Seattle for business, so she won’t be around to bother us.”

He nods, startled; he hadn’t realized that it was September 2nd, that school started again in two days.

She reaches out, takes his hand, smiles wanly at him.  “I’ve had a good time, Dave.  Haven’t you?”

He nods again, and puts his sunglasses on.


End file.
